12 JOHN EEABE 



and their desceiidauts are among the foremost in politics, business, the church, and the 

 professions at the present day. 



The Eise of Cities. 



Under their influence some of the old French settlements or posts were made the 

 centres of town and cities. Annapolis (1Y13) and Halifax (1*749) had, as British founda- 

 tions, preceded the conquest. Truro was founded three years after the taking of Quebec, 

 and some others grew up on the old sites without formal differentiation. (See ex-Grovernor 

 Archibald's most interesting address on the occasion of " the 121st anniversary of Truro's 

 natal day"). Niagara was for a time the rival of York, as Toronto was called. " The 

 cities of the old world," says Dr. Wilson, " have their mythic founders and quaint legends 

 still commemorated iu heraldic blazonry. But there is no mystery about the beginnings of 

 Toronto. Upper Canada was erected into a distinct province in 1791, only eight years 

 after France finally renounced all claim on the province of Quebec ; and a few mouths 

 afterwards General Simcoe, the first governor of the new province, arri^-ed at the old 

 French fort, at the mouth of Niagara river, and in May, 1193, selected the Bay of Toronto 

 as the site of the future capital. The chosen spot presented a dreary aspect of swam and 

 uncleared pine forest, but amid these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise 

 which already numbers upwards of 60,000 [by the last census 86,215] inhabitants, and, 

 rejecting the old Indian name since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York." 

 {Prehistoric Man, Vol. I, p. 18). Dr. Scadding has written the history of the city whose 

 birth is thus concisely described, and he, with the assistance of Mr. Dent, the able 

 author of " The Last Forty Years," is bringing out a jubilee volume on the same subject, 

 à propos of its fiftieth anniversary as a corporate city. Kingston, or Fort Cataraqui, is 

 another of these cuckoo foundations, and several of the smaller towns have been built on 

 or near the sites of old forts or missions in the Ontario peninsula, and Acadian settle- 

 menls along the Bay of Fundy, just as more lately Winnipeg rose suddenly to size and 

 celebrity in the vicinity of Fort Garry. The day may come when Fort Prince of Wales, 

 on Hudson's Bay, may win new renown by giving an air of antiquity to a Canadian 

 Archangel. 



The motives, circumstances and personnel, associated with the establishment of the 

 British Canadian cities that have no adventitious anticjuity of the kind in question, are 

 not quite unknowable. Some of them have been gathered by painstaking investigators, 

 such as Mr. Burrows, who has written the interesting " Annals of the Town of Guelph." 

 Local history of this kind has no small value iu enabling one to judge of the elements 

 that go to the making of a nation, but they lack the interest that pertains to the founda- 

 tion of Quebec or Montreal or Port Royal. 



Increase of Population. 



Let us now see what has been the growth of our population under the new régime. 

 In 1800, it was estimated at 240,000, less than than that of New Brunswick alone to-day. 

 In the next twenty-four years it more than doubled. In 1851, it had trebled the figures of 

 a quarter century before, and twenty years later it had risen to 3,65*7,887. The population 



